Anna Schrimpf

Dr. Anna Schrimpf is the Executive Director of J-PAL Europe, J-PAL's European regional office based at the Paris School of Economics. As Executive Director of J-PAL Europe, Anna provides strategic, technical, and operational direction to J-PAL's research, policy, and capacity-building engagements spanning more than 20 countries. J-PAL Europe conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs across a wide range of sectors, including education, labor, climate, and social protection. Examples of this work launched during Anna's tenure as Executive Director since 2018 include the European Social Inclusion Initiative (an initiative to support research and policy work promoting social inclusion in the region), the Innovation, Data, and Experiments in Education project (a long-term partnership with the French Ministry of Education to create actionable evidence in education with a focus on enhancing administrative data capacity) and the creation of a Policy Lab in Spain in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security, and Migration to bring evidence to the core of social policymaking in Spain. In addition to focusing on poverty and social inclusion in Europe, J-PAL Europe also works with European development actors including governments and implementation agencies to help foster a culture a culture of evidence generation and use in the European development sector. Anna served on an independent expert commission tasked with allocating the first fund for rigorous impact evaluation developed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. J-PAL Europe also leads the organisations' work on humanitarian issues worldwide, including the new Displaced Livelihoods Initiative.

Anna first joined J-PAL at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) as a Post-doctoral Associate to Prof. Esther Duflo and Prof. Abhijit Banerjee in 2016. In this capacity, she was a Principal Investigator on a large childhood immunization study in India. As Associate Director of Education at J-PAL Global, she also led the development and implementation of the MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy as well as the associated blended Master's program at MIT's Department of Economics. Making MIT training in development economics and randomized evaluations accessible worldwide, the programs aim to build a more inclusive economics profession, as well as a growing cohort of policy professionals able to think rigorously about evidence and impact. 

Before her time at J-PAL, Anna completed a Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University, during which she was a Centennial Fellow, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow, and a Prize Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows. Her dissertation on the politics of empathy was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Anna also holds a B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) from the University of Oxford. While an undergraduate and graduate student, Anna supported the work of several NGOs, think tanks, and government agencies in the U.S. and Europe.